What App Developers Are Saying About the iPad

Just as the offerings in Apple’s App Store helped fuel the iPhone’s success, software tailored for its new iPad will likely have a big impact on sales of the device. Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice president of iPhone software at Apple, on Wednesday predicted “a whole ‘nother gold rush for developers” as they race to exploit the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen and other features.

Associated Press

What follows are excerpts of what developers are saying about the heavily hyped gadget.

Joe Greenstein, CEO and co-founder of Flixster, maker of a popular movie social-networking app:
“We think this is the first of what is going to be a long-term trend toward a much more diverse set of Internet-connected computing devices. Apple is leading the way, but others will follow, driven by Google’s Android operating system and Microsoft’s Windows 7.

“Our app fits beautifully for a larger device. The constraint will be the availability of content–things like how fast studios get their content onto iTunes, how fast they’re able to have an incredible rich experience, where you feel like you can get rid of your Comcast connection.

“The challenges we see are whether the iPad will become a standard and how quickly users will adopt it.”

Tim Westergren, chief strategy officer of Internet radio company Pandora Media:
“It’s something we clearly want to put Pandora on, and we’re huddling here to figure out what’s the right approach. We’ll have to design a different user interface because it’s bigger than an iPhone, and the fact that it can’t run in the background is a challenge because people will want to read something while listening to music.”

Bob Bowman, CEO of MLB.com, which offers a baseball app:
“With this device, we can show almost everything that’s going on in the game — pitch speed, pitch trajectory, every run around the base. You can touch the screen to see what’s going on with the batter or what the runner is doing in a live game with just a five-second delay. The iPad is going to give you the ability to multitask.”

Ajay Panagariya, co-founder of Snapture Labs, maker of the photography app Snapture:
“I’m not too surprised that it doesn’t have a camera in the same way that the iPhone does.

“We’re definitely going to look at it. Maybe we can have a sister application or something that interfaces with Snapture somehow. It may be photo editing or photo manipulation. One question is the timing of the launch. With the iPhone, a lot of good applications got burned because there wasn’t a big enough user base. Having more users is more important sometimes than being first.”

Alexander Muse, co-founder of Big in Japan, maker of the ShopSavvy shopping app:
“We’re excited. The iPad really gives us an opportunity to use a lot more screen real estate. It really creates the opportunity for a product dashboard — where you can get a product online and where you can get it locally.

“We can show you a side by side comparison with a price history, or enable wish list sharing. Users can still use their smart phones as the input device to scan and then go back to the iPad to help organize a shopping list. Our excitement about this is that there is such a tight integration between the two devices.”

Shervin Pishevar, executive chairman of SGN, which sells multiple social games:
“It’s going to disrupt games, books and movies. The iPad for us is a big boon because now we have a really high quality screen to show what the game mean. We can also connect the iPhone or iPod touch to the iPad touch to the iPad, turn it into a mobile Wii gaming station.”

Phil Libin, CEO of EverNote, which makes an information organization app:
“We’re aiming to have a version of our app for the iPad’s March launch. We’ll be able to add more of our desktop features like thumbnails, tags, and the ability to zoom in and out and drag and drop. We’ll probably introduce digital ink support, so users can write or draw diagrams with their finger.”

Scott Dunlap, CEO of NearbyNow, which makes a shopping app:
“I was surprised by how much wasn’t in it. The video looks great, but from the software perspective and how well it works for magazines or books, clearly there’s room for improvement.

“What we’re most excited about is that it’s basically a mobile device with a very large fun factor. We have an idea for tappable ads, where you can tap on the model and see all the products that the model is wearing. I think it’s going to open up a lot of possibilities.”

John Lema, CEO of Scroll Motion, which offers an e-book app:
“What Apple showed yesterday was the idea that the iPad is a new portal to all the content in the world. Every bit of content in the world is about to be sold one more time for this device.

“We’ve got a big presence in trade books, but we see opportunities in children’s books, text books, graphic novels, and sports collectibles. We see these devices as the future of learning. This is going to change education.”